It is easy to live for others, everybody does. I call on you to live for yourself.
Interpretation
The quote encourages individualism and the importance of self-care over merely living for others.
Ralph Waldo Emerson highlights the common tendency for people to prioritize the needs and expectations of others at the expense of their own desires and aspirations. He urges individuals to take responsibility for their own lives and to pursue their own happiness and fulfillment, asserting that true authenticity comes from living for oneself rather than seeking to please others.
In practice
During a motivational speech, one might say, 'As Emerson reminds us, it is easy to live for others; we must strive to live for ourselves.'
It is plain that there is no separate essence called courage, no cup or cell in the brain, no vessel in the heart containing drops or atoms that make or give this virtue; but it is the right or healthy state of every man, when he is free to do that which is constitutional to him to do.
Few people have any next, they live from hand to mouth without a plan, and are always at the end of their line.
Men cease to interest us when we find their limitations
Tis the good reader that makes the good book; a good head cannot read amiss: in every book he finds passages which seem confidences or asides hidden from all else and unmistakeably meant for his ear.
The world belongs to the energetic.
Hast thou named all the birds without a gun?
If you think God’s there, He is. If you don’t, He isn’t. And if that’s what God’s like, I wouldn’t worry about it.
To have recourse to the veracity of the supreme Being, in order to prove the veracity of our senses, is surely making a very unexpected circuit.
Everything in life depends on how that life accepts its limits.
Most men and women lead lives at the worst so painful, at the best so monotonous, poor and limited that the urge to escape, the longing to transcend themselves if only for a few moments, is and has always been one of the principal appetites of the soul.
Now the relation which, in the sphere of nature, being and semblance or sensation bear to one another in this antithesis, is the same as that which in ethics exists between good and pleasure or feeling.
There are things that tend to moderate with age. Schizophrenia is somewhat like that.
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